Installing legacy nvidia driver + never used AUR before

I already posted in the hello thread, but for context I have installed arch on an old computer with a nvidia geforce2 mx/mx 400 card (rev b2).I looked up the driver for this card, and the NVIDIA wiki page suggested nvidia-96xx 96.43.23-5, but this requires nvidia-96xx-utils, which in turn requires downgrading the xorg server. I would prefer not to do that, and there is a driver that claims to not need nvidia-96xx-utils called nvidia-96xx-all 96.43.23-11. My main problem is that since I am new to (but willing to learn) using the terminal, I am having trouble following the instructions in the wiki on installing a package from the AUR.When I tried to build the extracted tar, I got a PKGBUILD does not exist error. This might have something to do with how I downloaded the tar.gz to var/cache/pacman (can't remember for sure), then I moved it to my /home partition. When I ls /home, I get: [username] lost+found nvidia-96xx-all.tar.gzThanks in advance.

Re: Installing legacy nvidia driver + never used AUR before

I'll bet 2 credits that, on the AUR project page, you downloaded the file pointed to by the link under the wide horizontal bar marked 'Sources'. If so, you downloaded the source files from upstream.

That is not what you want. What you want is in the small box at the upper right hand corner of the page that has a link called: "Download Tarbell". That is the link you want. It contains the PKGBUILD. When you run makepkg, it will, among other things, grab the upstream sources that I think you have already downloaded.

Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature -- Michael FaradayYou assume people are rational and influenced by evidence. You must not work with the public much. -- Trilby----How to Ask Questions the Smart Way

Re: Installing legacy nvidia driver + never used AUR before

@Scimmia: you won that bet. I did first click on view PKGBUILD,(using a separate computer of course) but that just displayed the text of the package, so I used the download link instead.

Also, I should have read further down the AUR wiki page the first time; I didn't move the tar to the ~/builds first. I haven't created a /builds directory yet; can I just do something like makedir ~/nvidia ?

I will probably need to add base-devel first; I almost did when I tried getting yaohrt, but I canceled when I read that yaohrt is out of date. Now I know base-devel is used for more than that.(makes sense, need make package)

Re: Installing legacy nvidia driver + never used AUR before

Dang Down two more credits.

Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature -- Michael FaradayYou assume people are rational and influenced by evidence. You must not work with the public much. -- Trilby----How to Ask Questions the Smart Way

Re: Installing legacy nvidia driver + never used AUR before

You can pretty much just forget about this, nvidia no longer activly maintain the 96xx driver, and it does not support xorg-server 1.14. You will have to downgrade xorg if you want to use this driver. You can use the [xorg113] repo listed on the catalyst page on the wiki to do this.

Re: Installing legacy nvidia driver + never used AUR before

I installed base-devel, created a ~/nvidia build folder, and nearly built the package correctly, but I got an error:

==> 4 of 5 - Building module for 3.8.7-1-ARCH. . .
[description of what to do for linux 2.4 or 2.6 kernels]
you may need to specify [the kernels's] location with the SYSSRC environment variable or the equivalent nvidia-installer command line option.
*** Unable to determine the target kernel version. ***
make: *** [select_makefile] Error 1
==> ERROR: A failure occured in package().
Aborting...

Is my problem that this driver doesn't work on 3.8 kernel, or do I need to tell it where the kernel source is?

Alternatively, maybe I should delete the /nvidia-96xx-all folder and try the nvidia-96xx and nvidia-96xx-utils; or I could try a nouveau driver, but my goal for now is to get the nvidia driver to work.

Re: Installing legacy nvidia driver + never used AUR before

I attempted an install with the legacy nvidia 96xx about a month ago. I installed the legacy xorg-server1.12 and a handful of other legacy packages. This was with the current kernel. I went the easy way and used packer. I wasn't able to start Xorg, however the errors were simply being unable to find any screens. But by that point I had run out of patience and gave up

Re: Installing legacy nvidia driver + never used AUR before

I tried running the NVIDIA-Linux-x86-96.43.23-pkg0.run file that make created before it had the kernel version error, and I actually got to the nvidia installer liscense The installer told me that there was a Nouveau driver already, and created

/etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-installer-disable-nouveau.conf

to disable it. I think I tried to start xorg after I installed it after the arch install, so that might have loaded some generic nouveau driver.

The installation would have worked, but I got another message about kernel versions:

The kernel header file ' /usr/src/linux-3.8.7-1-ARCH/include/linux/kernel.h' does not exist.
The most likely reason for this is that the kernel source path ' /usr/src/linux-3.8.7-1-ARCH' is incorrect.
Please make sure you have installed the kernel source files for your kernel and that they are properly configured;
if you know the correct kernel source files are installed, you may specify the kernel source path with the ' --kernel-source-path' command line option.

The link I mentioned in the last post looks useful; I think I have to either download the arch source and put it in /usr/src/ or create a symlink(?) to the linux-3.8.7-1-ARCH file I already have(is that the kernel?), and then I may have to "specify the kernel source path" somehow.

@grnkp: I read about Yaourt, and subsequently packer, a few days ago, but at the time aur helpers seemed like more trouble to set up than installing an AUR package by hand. If I get this arch build set up right, I might try packer. As you can tell by the topic, this computer was so old it was not being used for anything, and I'm just using it as an experiment, so if something goes horribly wrong I'll either wipe it again or work on something else.

I'll try specifying the kernel to the installer; and if that doesn't work I'll look into downloading the arch kernel source.

Re: Installing legacy nvidia driver + never used AUR before

I uninstalled xorg-server (current version), and I installed xorg-server1.12, then installed common and devel dependencies, and then installed xf86-input-evdev1 dependency.However, when I try startx, bash says startx is an unknown command.

When I originally installed Arch, I installed the x packages recomended on the beginner's install guide, xorg-server xorg-server-utils xorg-xinit .Since I've downgraded xorg-server, do I need to uninstall xorg-server-utils and xorg-xinit and install the 1.12 versions?Have I installed enough of the xorg-server1.12 dependencies(pacman only asked for common, devel, and xf86-input-evdev1)?

Or should I completely uninstall anything xorg related (any version) and start over with xorg 1.12?

Meta Question: Is the legacy nvidia driver much better than the default vesa driver?

Re: Installing legacy nvidia driver + never used AUR before

I installed xorg-xinit and ran startx again, and it failed.I looked at /var/log/Xorg.0.log, and it failed either because it couldn't find the nvidia driver or it couldn't "find any screens".

It seems that the nvidia driver is not working, since nvidia-xconfig doesn't do anything.

I'm thinking that I should uninstall the nvidia-96xx-[bold]all[/bold] driver and use the official nvidia-96xx and nvidia-96xx-utils. There was a change on the NVIDIA wiki page, and there is now a [city] repo, so I will try that if there is a way to safely uninstall the nvidia-96xx-all driver.

Everything before this seems to imply the driver would work, such as "Support for GLX with the Damage and Composite X ex$ enabled", butearlier in the file it tried to

LoadModule: "dri"
(later...)
LoadModule: "dri2"

and I remember in the NVIDIA wiki article it said to comment out

Load "dri"

in any configs for xorg. I tried to do that but I couldn't find any applicable configs in the xorg.conf.d(maybe I have stuff left over from the original new xorg I installed first)I might try uninstalling xorg and nvidia, then reinstalling from [city] since nvidia installed nicely from them.